


A Tiny Little Thing

by Anyjen



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Self-Hatred, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-22 12:55:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13764642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anyjen/pseuds/Anyjen
Summary: Six weeks. That’s all he could manage. That’s all he was able to give.One-eighth of an inch long, weighing less than a gram. Just starting to develop limbs, barely more than little bumps in a body about the size of a lentil or a chocolate sprinkle. And yet, already the owner of a steadily beating heart pumping a tiny amount of blood through minuscule arteries and veins. Already with the beginnings of eyes and ears and mouth. Already starting to develop tissue that would make up lungs and intestines, bones and brain...What kind of a man was he, that he couldn’t even hold on to such a tiny little thing for more than six weeks?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, read the tags? 
> 
> This is not a happy story, and may be triggering for some people. This is a fill for a prompt in the old Sherlock kink meme which I couldn't finish at the time.
> 
> I intend to fix that.
> 
> I tried to tackle the topic with as much sensitivity I could, but if I offend or hurt someone with it, I apologise in advance.
> 
> Things will get better, but they will get worse first.
> 
> It's unbetaed, because I'm not sure I can expose my amazing beta-readers to this much sadness.

Six weeks. That’s all he could manage. That’s all he was able to _give_.

John gave him everything, every day. His patience, his understanding, his companionship, his affection, his support... even more so these days than before, though it was never inconsiderable, not even at the beginning, when they were still friends, when they hadn't yet become romantically involved, when they hadn't yet entered an implicit agreement that they would try to be the best they could for each other, _to_ each other.

And what had he been able to give back?

Just six weeks. Forty-two days. One-thousand and eight hours. Sixty-thousand, four-hundred and eighty minutes. No more.

One-eighth of an inch long, weighing less than a gram. Just starting to develop limbs, barely more than little bumps in a body about the size of a lentil or a chocolate sprinkle. And yet, already the owner of a steadily beating heart pumping a tiny amount of blood through minuscule arteries and veins. Already with the beginnings of eyes and ears and mouth. Already starting to develop tissue that would make up lungs and intestines, bones and brain... the one everyone had joked would be formidable and likely to terrorize every human being that would attempt to teach it.

What kind of a man was he, that he couldn’t even hold on to such a tiny little thing for more than six weeks?

Nobody understood. They all got sad, serious expressions on their faces and told him firmly that it wasn’t his fault... that these things happened... he was still young, they could try again...

 _Idiots_ , all of them.

How could they not see it? How could they not observe that this wouldn’t be an isolated incident, that it would happen every single time?

He wasn’t even meant to carry a child in the first place. He was a beta and a male one at that; pregnancy was just an afterthought for his gender, something highly unlikely ever to happen in the first place, only meant as a biological fallback in times of scarcity when the most fertile genders were otherwise engaged in basic survival.

And considering the way he drove his body... not sleeping for days, barely eating, abusing any and every stimulant he was allowed... it had been too late to start doing things right by the time they found out; his body simply couldn't adjust in time to fix the abuse he had put it through over his entire life.

Really, he'd been a fool to expect anything else to happen.

If he couldn't even protect something that had beaten all the odds to come to existence inside him, if he couldn't be a safe haven for something so small and yet so great, then there really was no hope for him.

In the end, it was a tiny little thing that nearly destroyed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I in no way, shape or form believe people who have gone through such a heartbreaking thing are at fault for it, but since self-recrimination is common in these situations I tried to write it realistically. 
> 
> I appreciate comments, if you want to leave me any.
> 
> Next up, John's perspective.


	2. Chapter 2

Later, John would blame himself for not noticing earlier what was happening.

But to be fair, at the time he had been too busy nursing his own emotional wounds and trying to salvage whatever he could of his relationship with Sherlock to realize something was very, very wrong with the man, far more than could be expected considering the circumstances.

Heck, they'd both been thrown at the deep end with no warning whatsoever, and just as they were starting to get their footing, had it all taken away just as quickly and inexplicably.

Sherlock was a _beta_ , for god's sake. How could they have anticipated that he would get pregnant? Most people didn't even know Sherlock's real gender, believing him an alpha and John his faithful little beta sidekick... it came as a shock to most people when announcing the news that it was actually the other way around. Not the sidekick thing, though. John was of the firm belief that Sherlock could have been born an omega and still be every bit the unrelenting, overpowering force of nature that he was.

Pregnancy was the last thing in anybody's minds when it came to Sherlock Holmes. Even theirs.

It was laughable, really. They hadn't even noticed Sherlock was in heat at the time. A beta's heats, when they did happen, were nothing like the heats of an omega. There were no overpowering pheromones clouding people's minds and sending them to rut passionately, no noticeable change in behaviour, no excess of natural lubrication. There was only a slight increase in libido and just enough pheromones released into the air to make a suitable partner interested on a subconscious level.

It just so happened that Sherlock's heat had coincided with the end of an exhilarating case, full of chases, fights and a countdown to impeding doom... and Sherlock was naturally energetic and horny at the end of one of those anyway. As for John... well, he didn't need an excuse to want the gorgeous bastard anyway he could have him. If they had been a bit more enthusiastic than usual and were driven to go more rounds than normal, well, John was not the kind of man to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Then three weeks and an unmistakeable change in Sherlock’s natural scent later, they’d had to face the unthinkable.

The mad genius and the adrenaline junkie were going to become parents.

To John, the prospect had somehow been more terrifying than being strapped to enough semtex to blow up a whole building.

True, at one point in his life he’d thought he’d wanted it... settling down with a nice partner who would give him a kid or a few, living in a house with a white picket fence and a dog in the yard... but he’d stopped picturing those things during Afghanistan and the dull, gray days after being discharged home.

He was broken. Normality had somehow become his worst nightmare. It was extremely lucky of him to meet Sherlock, in a sense, because if there was one thing John could be sure of, was that as long as that gorgeous, brilliant madman was around, normality was completely out of the bargain.

Well, against all odds, normality had managed to worm its way into their life again, and neither John nor Sherlock knew quite what to do with it.

Their most ferocious rows in years had taken place in those very first days. Blame and accusations had been thrown one way and the other, parried, rebuffed, denied or ignored. Sherlock accusing John of planning this, of knowing and not telling him, of deliberately not using protection the only time it would have made a difference, John throwing the same accusations back, because how could _Sherlock_  not _know_?

They had never spoken the words aloud, neither of them, but they both had known where this was leading. Neither of them had planned or even wanted to be a parent. Their lifestyle just wasn’t compatible with a child. The only logical course of action would be a termination, but somehow, something always stopped them from ever voicing it.

It had been as if they said it aloud, they couldn’t take it back. It would become a reality, a certainty.

They had alternated between screaming themselves hoarse, slamming doors and throwing things, and stony silences, pointedly ignoring each other, sleeping in separate bedrooms and going out of their way to avoid being in the same room for any stretch of time. It got so bad Mrs. Hudson had taken to tiptoeing around them for fear of setting them off again, and that was saying something, as normally they’d have no way to get her to stop mothering them. Heck, she’d been hinting at them having a baby together since practically the first day, biological improbabilities nonwithstanding. And living on the floor below, well, there was no way she couldn’t have known what the rows had been about.

It had been nearly three full days before they’d found themselves silently sitting right next to each other on their couch, John staring straight ahead at the godawful wallpaper of their living room walls, Sherlock glaring at a point between his feet.

John wasn’t quite sure how long they spent like that, just sitting in silence, each lost to his own thoughts, when the silence was broken by Sherlock’s baritone, as calm and cool as if he’d been voicing one of his constant demands of tea.

“Hamish”

John blinked.

“What was that?”

A scoff, impatient.

“If it’s a boy, I was thinking Hamish.”

“Hamish Holmes? Horrible alliteration. He’d be teased to death at school.”

“It was you who suggested it as an option, if I were ever to be looking for baby names.* And what’s wrong about Hamish Watson?”

“There’s already one in the world. We don’t need two.”

“I happen to find the company of the one I know quite agreeable. I wouldn’t mind there being two.”

And just like that, it had been like the previous three days had never existed.

They would be having a baby.

And they’d tried, they’d _really_ tried.

Following their unspoken agreement that yes, they would be going to do this, Sherlock had dived head first into research, for which, of course, he’d confiscated John’s laptop. Checking his history later, John had found a whole bunch of pregnancy websites, ranging from the ones with horrid pink and flowery backgrounds to the most gruesomely detailed medical texts, complete with pictures and videos of childbirth, both natural and medically assisted.

Sherlock had been focusing his research on male beta pregnancies, and all the websites insisted on the same things: good food, plenty of rest, no stimulants whatsoever, and as little stress as humanly possible.

That evening, Sherlock had ordered and consumed an insane amount of food and then proceeded to throw up the whole lot. He had then declared whoever had called pregnancy nausea “morning sickness” the most idiotic of misnaming morons ever to have existed and resorted to nibbling small, but nutritive meals several times a day and even a couple of times a night in between sleeping close to eight full hours, something John had never imagined he’d be able to witness. Sherlock had even scaled back his involvement in cases, limiting his action to observation and deduction only, no crazy chases across London.

Simply put, Sherlock had thrown himself into his pregnancy with the same fervour that he usually did his cases.

And in the end, it hadn’t mattered one bit.

As suddenly as it had started, it had ended.

Not as a result of an attack, a poisoning, some horrible accident or an experiment gone wrong, as John had overheard some unkind police officers whisper behind their backs, but rather quietly, after a day in which they hadn’t done much of anything. One moment, Sherlock had been lying down in his favourite position on the sofa, digesting a small dinner, and the next, he’d let out a quiet gasp and a panicked call of John’s name.

Everything after that was a blur to John, the call to the ambulance, the trip to the hospital, Sherlock being admitted and all the questions and tests, all of it, until the moment they had been sitting inside a room, staring at the monitor on a sonogram machine while a doctor fruitlessly looked for the tiny little miracle that had been there only hours before. That moment, and Sherlock’s stricken face were indelibly branded in John’s memory.

Sherlock hadn’t spoken for a week after that.

He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t shower, wouldn’t touch his violin, answer his phone or try to steal John’s laptop, barely even got up to use the loo. John had had to force him to drink something, had endlessly tried to coax him to eat something, with very poor results.

Their friends had all come to see them during that time, sad and awkward. A pregnancy, even a very early one, was a very public thing**, and the loss of it something nobody ever quite knew how to handle. Nobody’d  had any idea what they could say or do to help, and as a result ended up spouting the same tired old platitudes that had made John clench his fists and struggle to not just throw them all out of their apartment. Particularly when Sherlock had still refused to move out from the sofa but been present for every word.

And then one day, John had made his bleary way to the kitchen for some breakfast after a horrible night of poor sleep to find Sherlock perfectly clean and wide awake, wolfing down a piece of toast and shoving a perfectly acceptable cup of tea under John’s nose.

‘Hurry up’, he’d said, ‘we have a case’, he’d said.

As if nothing had happened at all. And John, heartsick and desperate for a return to normality, _their_ normality, had not questioned it, had jumped at the chance to get his Sherlock back, especially if it meant John didn’t have to lie awake in bed torturing himself with all the images of a future they might have had.

Maybe, he’d thought, maybe this was a good sign. Maybe Sherlock had finally started to heal from this, and John wouldn’t have to feel so guilty for his inability to help, for his part in putting Sherlock through the whole thing in the first place.

Maybe they would be fine, after all.

Oh, how wrong he had been.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Sherlock is referring to the events in "A scandal in Belgravia", when John blurts out that line about Hamish as a possible baby name in an effort to break the sexual tension between Sherlock and Irene Adler.
> 
> **This is something I suspect would be an inevitability of a society in which everybody had a prodigious sense of smell. The slightest biological change would be broadcasted for everybody to know, and so a pregnancy, and then a miscarriage, would be immediately obvious.
> 
> The third, and possibly last, chapter will take a bit longer, because my cat fell ill and it takes a lot out of me to take care of her.
> 
> I love comments, if you wish to let me know what you think of this creation of mine.


End file.
